World Heritage at the 2016 IUCN Congress

Discover the IUCN Congress through the World Heritage and Nature-Culture Journeys!

Journeys are designed to help you find easily all events related to an area of interest. The World Heritage and Nature-Culture journeys have been regrouped in one document. Download it here.

World Heritage Journey

Given their high profile, natural World Heritage sites can play a key leadership role in conservation, demonstrating excellence in management and providing solutions to complex challenges. While two-thirds of these sites are well conserved, many others face serious threats including poaching, extractive activities and climate change. We must make the conservation of all these outstanding places a global responsibility shared by governments, the private sector, civil society, communities and indigenous peoples – and a litmus test for the conservation community. The World Heritage Journey highlights the contributions partners and stakeholders of the Convention can make to protecting World Heritage. See also UNESCO World Heritage Review n°79, “Planet at the Crossroads”

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Nature-Culture Journey

For millennia people interacted with their natural surroundings, sometimes as participants in the functioning of ecosystems, protectors of sacred natural sites, other times shaping landscapes, including through agriculture and fishing. People have developed traditional and scientific knowledge, belief systems and management and practices. The Nature-Culture Journey will build on the growing evidence that natural and cultural heritage are closely interconnected in most landscapes and seascapes, and that effective and lasting conservation of such places depends on better integration of philosophies and procedures regarding their management. The Journey is jointly coordinated by IUCN and ICOMOS, and developed with a range of partners. See also UNESCO World Heritage Review n°75, “Culture-Nature Links”

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About the IUCN World Conservation Congress

IUCN convenes the World Conservation Congress every four years in different parts of the world. In 2016, it will take place in Hawai’i from 1 to 10 September. The Congress has two components: the Forum – a hub of public debate – and the Members’ Assembly, IUCN’s highest decision-making body.

With some 1,200 events in four days, the Forum is an open platform to showcase the latest in conservation. It covers the latest scientific, political and social aspects of environmental issues across the spectrum, from wildlife and protected areas to environmental economics, climate change and human rights.

The Forum informs the Members’ Assembly, where IUCN’s more than 1,300 government and civil society Member organisations spend the final four days of the event debating and deciding a course of action for the most pressing and often controversial global conservation issues. With the broad diversity and far-reaching influence of IUCN’s membership, the decisions taken at the IUCN Congress define not only IUCN’s work plan for the subsequent four years but also the global conservation agenda.